


Not Waiting On the World to Change (but doing it her damn self)

by saltwaterselkie



Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Ace!Marta, Asexual Character, Basically, Canon Compliant, Dogs, Fluff, Gen, Mayor Marta becomes a thing if that's interesting to anyone, Post-Canon, Wish Fulfillment, also, also she half-adopts Fran's kids, and is just an overall very good person, but there, content's not explicity, cutie pies :), enjoy, except i wanted to, honestly this didn't really NEED to be written, money-wise, of what would Marta do, okay, okay so this is basically a super fluffy version, only teen and up because i realized there's a couple swears, small ones, the dogs, with a huge-ass fortune and a publishing company, you know the ones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23291845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltwaterselkie/pseuds/saltwaterselkie
Summary: Marta's got a mansion, a fortune, and a publishing company with her name on them. What's she gonna do with it all?
Relationships: Benoit Blanc & Marta Cabrera, Marta Cabrera & Meg Thrombey
Comments: 38
Kudos: 186





	Not Waiting On the World to Change (but doing it her damn self)

After it’s all over, Marta stands wrapped in a throw atop Harlan’s balcony, sipping from his favorite mug. _My house. My rules. My coffee_.

She’s not much of a coffee drinker, so the steaming brown liquid she’s gulping down in the chilly autumn air is _chocolate caliente_ instead, her mother’s special recipe. Her sister prefers store-bought powder, but Marta likes it just the way her mamá whips it together. She’s never figured out exactly what goes into the chocolate mix, but there’s a hint of citrus that makes her think the secret ingredient is orange zest.

The expressions on the family’s faces as they look up at her make her feel both vindicated and slightly ashamed. Linda still looks shell-shocked; Walt is glaring; the alt-right kid throws a middle finger her way before his mother breaks the spell and slaps his hand down, scolding him with a sharp tongue. After that, they all stop looking at her, bustling around to their various cars and family squabbles as she watches. It’s somewhat a relief, not to have all their eyes sinking into her anymore.

Marta shivers and takes another sip of her hot chocolate. It steams into the air in much more graceful swirls than the whuffing smoke billowing from the cars as they peel out, one after the other.

Marta turns, looks at her new house, and smiles.

<><><>

She spends the first few days organizing Harlan’s things and putting hers into place. She gave her mother and sister the option to move in with her, if they wanted, but now that the rent for their old place is no issue (Marta won’t tell her family just yet, but she bought it outright as soon as the executor finalized the transfer of funds) her mother wants to stay. At least until Andrea is out of high school.

Marta’s sister whines and moans about the decision for a solid fifteen minutes before remembering that Harlan’s house, as she once articulately put it to Marta, is “pretty fucking creepy.” Marta hides a smile. _She_ thinks the house is like an old friend once you get to know it; it has its idiosyncrasies and its secrets, and she’s not even sure that she’s discovered them all, but she suspects someday she will. Now that she has a lifetime for it.

On the first day she is really, truly feeling at home in the mansion, she receives two letters, deposited carefully on her porch. The first one is from Detective Blanc. All the second one says is “Marta” on the front in scrawled letters, the “ta” part smudged from a too-hasty hand. Given her inauspicious track record with anonymous messages, Marta opens that one first.

It’s (thankfully) not time sensitive. No grave edicts requesting that she be present at an abandoned warehouse in fifteen minutes or anything of that nature. No, it’s simply an invitation to a funeral.

Fran’s funeral.

Marta sits on one of the nice sofas, ruffling Christie’s mottled brown ruff. King is over at the window, intently focused on a squirrel who seems to be puffing its tail in his face. She’s never really lonely here, not with the dogs for company, but today, for the first time, she misses Fran’s presence as well as Harlan’s.

She dresses in her best for the funeral, black sweater and dark slacks and a solemn face. She’s welcomed by Fran’s three teenagers, twins and a younger brother. Instantly her heart pangs; she recalls the day Fran had come to work with a black eye and Harlan, without hesitation, had offered to pay for a good lawyer – both for assault charges, if she wanted to bring them, and divorce. Fran had taken him up on both offers.

And now here are her children, motherless and broke.

Marta doesn’t think twice. After the funeral, she invites Alexis, Beatriz, and Daniel to join her at the mansion. For however long they need.

It is only after they’ve all three moved in, and the house is bustling with teens grabbing breakfast and zooming off to school, that Marta realizes she may have been a little lonely after all.

She donates a million dollars to the ACLU the next day. It’s the first large sum of money she’s spent on anything, and it boggles her mind that it’s something she can even _do_ without making a real dent in her finances. Without having to change her lifestyle whatsoever.

After a few weeks unemployed (her last job died with Harlan), Marta has had enough. She’s itching to _do_ something, and just like fate, she gets an email.

It’s from the staff at the publishing company, asking how she’s going to manage it from here on out.

Honestly, she hasn’t the first clue how to manage the publishing company. She does her research, though, and soon she finds that Walt’s been slowly purging the payroll, dismissing all but the most vital employees. He’s been slowly culling workers for years, and yet the amount of money attributed to salaries hasn’t changed… _skimming_ , she realizes suddenly as she stares at numbers that don’t add up.

Something ugly rears its head in her chest, and Marta pushes it away. She calls each and every name on the list of fired employees and invites them back to their old jobs with a 10% raise, should they want to return. She tries to explain that things will be different from now on, though she doesn’t think that most of them believe her.

Still, 10% is a solid raise, and the majority of the old employees come back. Marta doesn’t sell the rights to TV or film; she knows Harlan wouldn’t want it and, for that reason alone, doesn’t even go there. Of course, there’s also the chance that his vengeful spirit might come haunt her for the rest of eternity if she _does_.

She finds a part-time gig working at a nursing home, and it’s good to be back into it. Alexis and Beatriz have a birthday and suddenly they’re eighteen. They look at her for only an instant with anxious eyes before she laughs out loud and promises they can stay however long they’d like.

It’s on that day, giggling and playing Go and talking into the night by the crackling fire, that Marta learns Alexis is a writer.

“Her stuff is _good_ , too,” Daniel promises. “Top-tier shit, I’m telling you.”

“Language,” Beatriz snaps. He rolls his eyes.

“No, I’m serious, Marta,” he pushes. Alexis looks like she’s about to melt in embarrassment. “She’s got all these horror stories she loves writing and you’ll piss your pants, they’re so fucking frightening.” He stares at Beatriz, punctuating his cusses with little tilts of the head meant specifically to piss her off. Beatriz notices and flips him off.

“They’re really not that good,” Alexis stammers, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear and flushing red as a Disney apple. “I… I mean, not compared to some of the stuff that Harlan’s written.”

Beatriz blinks owlishly from behind her glasses for a moment, then turns to Marta as if she’s conceding defeat to Daniel. “They actually are quite excellent novels,” she confirms. “Send her _The Doorway_ , Lexi.”

“I couldn’t sleep for weeks after that one!” Daniel crows triumphantly. ( _“That speaks more to you being a wimp than the book being scary,”_ Beatriz mutters.)

Alexis, still blushing furiously, pulls her phone out of her pockets. With a few quick swipes, Marta feels her own phone buzz. Notification: email. With Word document attached.

“I’m sure it’s great,” she tells Alexis, and then redirects the conversation before Alexis dies of a heart attack on her birthday.

<><><>

She starts the book that night, Christie and King curled up at the foot of her giant bed. By the third page, she’s looking up to check the window for grinning corpse faces. By the second chapter, she has to get up to close the curtains. By the end of the book (which she finishes _far_ too early in the morning by any reasonable estimate) she has to get up and go around checking in the closets and under her bed to make sure nothing is lurking.

In Daniel’s immortal words, it’s “top-tier shit.”

And Marta thinks of the publishing company. And she has an idea.

<><><>

Alexis is entirely averse to it at first, but her siblings talk her around with much cajoling, teasing, and genuine encouragement. When she finally gives the go-ahead, Marta sends _The Doorway_ to the head editor. She gets an email by the next morning, only two lines long: _Needs a little work. This is the next bestseller._

Daniel gives an ungodly shriek when he reads it and insists upon performing it aloud, incessantly, for his sisters. For some reason, he’ll only say the words in a British accent. His renditions generally add “Jeeves” to the end of both sentences for reasons Marta certainly can’t fathom. _Needs a little work, Jeeves. This is the next bestseller, Jeeves._

Alexis doesn’t say she’s happy, but she doesn’t stop humming the whole next week, either, and after a few months of editing the manuscript is even more polished and even more likely to scare a reader shitless. Marta proudly gives the publishing order.

A sort of warm glow settles over her, and she lets one of the PR people know that Blood Like Wine Publishing is, for the first time, accepting external submissions. She asks that they emphasize the company’s desire to support diverse voices in a variety of genres. And suddenly the emails are flooding in, from plucky college students to immigrants Marta’s grandmother’s age to a trans woman whose memoir legitimately brings Beatriz to tears.

Not all of them are good; in fact, most of them are crap. But Marta has money, and she has a strong desire to hire as many people as she needs for this job, and every submission – every single one – gets detailed feedback on how to improve and resubmit. That is, except for the gems the editors jump on with unabashed joy. Young Adult, Fantasy, Biography… Marta is only now realizing how rife the world is with truly great stories, and she ignores every critic who says that she’s forcing too much representation, that she’s going to drive a company with a good name into the ground… because the profits of Blood Like Wine are skyrocketing.

Daniel, always bright, reveals to Marta the next year that he’s created an algorithm (“A bot?” Marta asks, and Daniel corrects her, disgusted: “it’s an _algorithm,_ Marta”) to scan and take down any pirated copies of Blood Like Wine books. It’s an advantage their competitors haven’t been able to match, he explains.

Marta listens carefully. After consideration, she calls up the head editor, makes her request, and is redirected to an appropriate party.

Soon, the Andrea Cabrera Library Initiative (named after Marta’s sister, who’s working her way through a geology degree at Northwestern) sweeps the country. Marta has the funds for it; it means automatic enrollment for each family in each library district into the system, increased education about library apps and the legal eBooks they host, and bookmobiles travelling to more rural locations to make sure everyone has access, with an online request system so books can be delivered right to people’s doors and returned the same way.

When the Initiative is in full swing, she asks Daniel to extend his algorithm to cover _all_ copyrighted works on piracy sites – not just those from Blood Like Wine. He grumbles and mumbles and does it. She’s sure eventually someone will find their way around the coding work of a teen genius, but she’s hoping most people will have broken their bad habits by then.

There’s always something more to do. Hire up-and-coming narrators to provide voicework for Blood Like Wine audiobooks. Send authors on tour just because she can. Start after-school writing workshops in the city for underprivileged kids. Bankroll Beatriz’s monthlong protest at the border, fighting for better treatment for asylum seekers (the last one isn’t strictly publishing business, but it’s one of the ones Marta is most proud of).

And then, five years to the day after Harlan’s death, she gets an email from meggle_eggle1992@gmail.com.

At first, Marta bites her bottom lip and doesn’t open it. None of the family have deigned contact her since it all went down – except for a few cryptic letters from Ransom in prison that she thought were meant to be clever riddles about how he’d murder her when he got out (she’d been scared of them until Daniel found one and did it in his ridiculous British accent, and now Marta can’t think of Ransom as any more threatening than a movie villain, especially with Christie and King around to protect her) – and she’s surprised that Meg would reach out.

But then she thinks that she needs to be the bigger woman here, and she opens it not just because that’s what Harlan would’ve done, but because it’s what she wants to do.

It’s an apology.

Not just a little one, either. It stretches on for what Marta thinks would be at least five pages if she printed it out. Not trite, not drivel, not pleas for money – just a pure apology, outlining everything Meg did wrong and the fact that she regrets it. Not that she regrets the Marta took it the wrong way – no backhanded insult at Marta like that – but a real, true apology.

At the end Meg adds that she’s been working as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant the last two years. “You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen,” she ends with, “except for the fact that we put you through the same. _I_ put you through the same. No need to reply to all this – I just thought it needed to be said.”

It’s the last bit that really gets Marta, and she finds herself replying.

They never _really_ get back to the way things were when Meg hadn’t yet, you know, told the Thrombeys that Marta’s mother was undocumented and let them blackmail her with it. But things are better now. Marta knows it and the twins know it and Daniel knows it.

Beatriz marries a stuntwoman she met at a protest. Alexis comes out to Marta as ace and there are a lot of tears and hugs before Marta’s timely realization that maybe there’s a reason _she’s_ never been particularly attracted to anybody either. The three of them go to pride together with flags sewn by Daniel’s steady hand. They meet two kids who’ve been kicked out for being gay and suddenly the mansion hosts a household of six.

The year she turns forty, Marta is featured as TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. Her life feels like it’s flashing past. She starts enthusiastically investing in clean energy. She runs for Mayor, is defeated, runs again the next election cycle, and takes the seat.

The winds of change have treated Marta to a tornado of a life so far. She sits on her balcony with a bill for establishing more bike lanes on her lap. She watches Beatriz’s daughter running around with Conan and Doyle, the replacements for much-loved Christie and King (and named in the same style). She reads through Detective Blanc’s most recent letter and scrawls out her opinion on the prime suspect. And as she sips hot chocolate from that old mug, now with a chip on the handle from when Daniel nudged it off the table with an enthusiastic elbow as a teen, she thinks that she wouldn’t have had it any other way.


End file.
